Traveler's Dream!

A little background

I work as a technical consultant and travel a lot. I also happen to be tech savvy and have fairly high requirements for a laptop. I have owned/used 4 dell laptop and 1 IBM ThinkPad in the past 4 years. I know my way around computer hardware and am not afraid to upgrade / take apart and put it back together.

What I needed

I need a laptop that I could take with me whenever and where ever. It needs to be portable as I travel a lot and do a fair amount of work on planes, airports, in my car, at random locations and odd places. I needed to have as much battery life as possible.

It needs to be powerful. I run many enterprise level applications including virtual machines in Vmware, Databases applications and tools (including Oracle, MySQL and MS SQL server), Web and graphic design tools (Adobe Creative Suite), Programming tools ( Visual Studio), and MS Office. I will also be using it to surf the internet, watch videos, and play music pretty much constantly. I like to have many many windows and programs open at the same time. I also do a fair amount of design work so I need good screen resolution.

It needs to be durable and well constructed; again, I travel a lot!

Why I got the X61 Tablet

It’s extremely portable. It’s tiny! It weights under 5lbs with the EXTENDED battery pack, which by the way takes up half the bottom of the laptop and adds like 2lbs! I have run the battery for more than 5 hours doing light work on it. Even the power cord is small and light compared to my Dell’s of past. The construction is great and lives up to LENOVO / IBMs reputation. I have dropped it a few times with no problems. I did a lot of research before I bought this and there were a lot of people who had an issue with the screen separating. I have had this laptop for a few months now and have not had any issues. It also fits wonderfully in the airplane tray!

It is extremely powerful and versatile for such a small package. First I upgraded to the 1.8ghz processor with 4mb of cache. I also upgraded to 4 gb of ram which was about $60 at newegg.com! I chucked the 1 gb that came with the laptop. The ram was extremely easy to upgrade. I also upgraded to the 7200 RPM hard drive which should help performance but will drain your battery faster. Finally I did a full clean install of windows vista business 64 bit. You need 64 bit to see all 4 gb of ram. There are numerous well written step by step articles on notebookreview.com’s forums which show you how to do a clean install. Lenovo did install a lot of crap by default. My benchmarks are running about 15% faster overall after the clean install.

The screen is amazing. 1400x 1050 in a 12” screen! I do admit it’s a little small and will start to hurt your eyes after a few hours of staring at it. It is also a tablet so you can draw on the screen with the included pen. Now I must say that even though I use Microsoft One Note and Adobe Illustrator a lot, I have hardly use the “tablet” functionality. It is nice to have and I have had to draw diagrams and stuff on it which was nice. However most times it is faster just to type notes. The one thing I do really love about the screen is that you can rotate it back and hold it like a book. It has an on screen directional pad which lets you scroll. This is PERFECT for reading ebooks, pdfs, downloaded articles / magazines.

In terms of performance, you will not win any benchmark battles against main stream none ultra portable laptops. However, I find that it adequately handles everything I have tried to do. I have run 3 virtual machines at the same time on this laptop via external hard drive using VMware: 1 application/ internet server, 1 oracle database server, and 1 reporting server all talking to each other. I think it will more than handle most people computing requirements.

This laptop is also very quite. It doesn’t really heat up too much. Your palm rest will get a little warm but that’s about it. It comes with a good amount of ports. 3 USB ports is key, that was one of the features lacking on many other ultra portables. It also comes with a SD card reader which is immensely useful! It does lack an optical drive. The only time I had a problem with this was doing a clean install of Vista. I had to do a clean install off a USB key which was annoying. Other than that, I hardly ever use CDs DVDs anymore.

So one of the reasons I got this machine was that it was surprisingly affordable. Lenovo constantly has sales on these tablets. I got mine more or less fully upgraded (upgraded myself) for under $1600 after a bunch of coupons. They are a PAIN to deal with and take forever to ship your laptop; mine took over a month! You NEED to call them to complain and they will “take care of you.” Their purchase process is not nearly as nice or as quick as Dell’s from my past experience. But when I compared this to other company’s ultra portables for features vs. prices there was no comparison.

Would I do it again?

Definitely yes! It is not 100% perfect! I would rather have a wide screen that was slightly bigger (13”?). The lack of optical drive is a drawback for a lot of people but for me it hasn’t been a problem. I wished they didn’t put so much junk on the laptop when they ship it out and that they would install vista 64 bit. But overall I would say this fit the bill nicely and I am pretty happy with this laptop.